Professor C N R Rao

Professor C.N.R. Rao has instituted Professor C. N. R. Roa Distinguished Lecture in the Department of Chemistry. Professor Chintamani Nagesa Ramachandra Rao was born on 30th June 1934 in Bangalore. He obtained his PhD in 1958 from Purdue University and became a research chemist at the University of California at Berkeley. Returning to India in 1959, he joined IISc, Bangalore and then moved to the Department of Chemistry at IIT Kanpur. From 1963 to 1976, he was a Professor of Chemistry at IIT Kanpur. During 1984-89, he was the Director of IISc, Bangalore. Concurrent with his academic excellence, he was appointed in 2005 as Chair of the Scientific Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India. He has won several national and international prizes. Professor Rao is a foreign member of the US National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Royal Society (London). He has also been given the high honors of Padma Shri and Padma Vibhushan by the Government of India.




Professor Sanjay Mittal, Department of Aerospace Engineering gave a lecture titled, "Using High Performance Computing (HPC) for Understanding Fluid Flows" on 26th March 2012. Prof. Mittal began the lecture with a brief overview of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Then, he gave a summary of his group's recent research efforts to understand fluid flows, by using computational tools. Prof. Mittal also discussed his group’s work towards understanding the mechanism of swing and reverse-swing of a cricket ball. Questions such as, 'can a new ball reverse-swing?' were also addressed. In general, Prof. Mittal and his group employ modern stabilized finite element methods for solving the governing equations for fluid flows. They are utilized to compute flows at various Reynolds and Mach numbers including those that involve moving boundaries. Some of the flow problems arise from practical applications while others add to the understanding of certain fundamental issues in fluid mechanics. Most of the applications require large scale computing. To that extent, wherever possible, in-house codes have been parallelized using MPI libraries. Scalability on parallel computers has also been demonstrated. Parallel implementations on the Linux cluster have resulted in super-linear speed-up. One of the several problems that the Mittal group studied is the flow in the air-intake of a high speed engine. A mixed compression intake for a Mach=3 flow is considered. Viscous effects as well as boundary layer bleed are modeled. The buzz instability is observed in certain cases. Both little and big buzz are found. Their frequency is related to the super-harmonics of the intake duct which acts as an open-closed organ pipe. The role of bleed in controlling the buzz oscillations is studied. A brief overview of their work on understanding wakes of bluff bodies was presented.
Prof. Sanjay Mittal did his B.Tech in Aerospace Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1988. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, USA in 1992. He joined IIT Kanpur as a faculty member in 1994. He has served as the Dean of Academic Affairs of the Institute. He received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in 2006. He is a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering and of the Indian Academy of Sciences. His research interests include unsteady aerodynamics, laminar separation bubbles on airfoils, aerodynamic shape optimization, fluid structure interactions, bluff body flows, linear stability analysis, buzz instability in air intakes, aerodynamics of sports balls, train aerodynamics, traffic modeling and high performance .